Since this month was shorter due to spring break, I decided to look into a tool that would be easy to learn but still useful. Hypothesis is a digital tool that allows you annotate online articles with others or just on your own. I decided to check this tool out because I often print out the many pages of my readings to annotate them. I wanted to see if I would want to incorporate this into my academic life.

I was reading Dr. Johanna Drucker’s “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display,” an article about the digital humanities my project lead and was taking me a while to finish. I switched at the mid-point from a physical copy to the online version. I installed the Hypothesis plug-in on Chrome, switching from Safari. Others who are using Hypothesis can also publish their annotations publicly, and other users will be able to view them. I was able to read these comments.

Interacting with this tool provoked a reflection on how I annotate. Sometimes, my annotations are just gibberish, marks, repetition of phrases I find important. I circle, underline, double-underline, bracket, box in ways that feel arbitrary. I just want to make a mark for the sake of doing it, to acknowledge that I felt something. Most of the annotations from others I had to seen were fully formed sentences and questions. I had trouble deciphering the difference Drucker was making between data and capta, so on my physical copy, I had to continually write give (data) and taken (capta) to remind myself. Through Hypothesis, others were making meaningful engagements with the text that pushed an understanding of the text, a level I didn’t feel I was on yet. It felt silly using the Hypothesis plug-in to simply replicate what I would do with a physical copy of the article (as much as this is possible), even if it was just for my viewing. There was that divide between the largely finished and cleaned-up thinking of Drucker and my unfinished thinking that was jarring in contrast online but may be endearing on the physical page.

So, what can Hypothesis offer that I don’t already have? For those, like myself, who prefer physical mediums and the ability to mark up a text with a pen or pencil, I can see how this tool would be helpful in the process of thinking. My thoughts are almost never fully formed about a text in the process of reading. Hypothesis would come in after I’ve had time to process the text in a way that feels more private (the physical text) to me. After I’ve had time to wrestle with the text on paper, I could re-visit it online and narrow and sharpen the scope of my response to the text.

I’ve not tried this tool in a group setting, but I can see how method way of annotating can be useful in a class or group setting. It’ll put everyone on the same page, and it would request for people to engage with a specific portion of the text, as they would need to highlight a section. This could hopefully keep people from devolving into vagueness or broad statements about a text. For those conducting research, Hypothesis would be a good tool for keeping a running list of annotations and corresponding thoughts organized and easy to reference.